El Paso visit underscores Trump’s border woes
By his own reckoning, Donald Trump should be beloved in border communities.
After all, the signature issue of Trump’s brief political career — both his unlikely victory in the 2016 presidential election and his turbulent first two years in the Oval Office — has been the promise to make the border safer by constructing a “big, beautiful wall” between the United States and Mexico.
That fixation on border crime defined Trump’s campaign announcement speech at Trump Tower in June 2015. It also dominated Monday night’s unofficial kickoff to his 2020 re-election campaign, in the border city of El Paso.
As Trump reveled in the adoration of a packed El Paso County Coliseum crowd, with red-andwhite “Finish the Wall” banners hanging from rafters behind him, it was hard to dispute the president’s self-described “great romance” with the people of Texas.
But one of the most discordant notes in Trump’s ongoing symphony to himself is the fact that he has underperformed with voters in border counties and states. In other words, the people he professes to want to protect, who are actually experiencing the conditions that he bemoans along the border, seem to be among the least persuaded by his message.
That anti-Trump sentiment could be found Monday night only a few blocks away from Trump’s big rally, as former El Paso Congressman (and possible Democratic presidential contender) Beto O’Rourke headlined a rally at a baseball park to debunk Trump’s doomsday message.
It can also be found in election numbers.
In El Paso County, Trump received only 26 percent of the vote in 2016, while John McCain and Mitt Romney, the GOP nominees in 2008 and 2012, both received more than 33 percent of the vote there. Trump lost El Paso County by a margin of 43 percent to Hillary Clinton, while both McCain and Romney lost there to Barack Obama by 32 percent.
U.S. District 23, a perpetual swing district which stretches from South San Antonio to West Texas, covers more than 40 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump lost the district by 3 percent in 2016, while U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, his fellow Republican, managed to carry the district by slightly more than 1 percent.
Hurd opposes Trump’s proposed border wall, calling it the “most expensive and least effective” route to border security.
Trump also received a smaller share of the vote than Romney and McCain in Cameron and Hidalgo counties, two of the key border communities in the state.
It’s also telling that the three states in which Democrats made the biggest presidential gains from 2012 to 2016 — Texas, Arizona and California — are all on the Mexican border. (The fourth border state, New Mexico, went Democratic in both elections, with Trump doing slightly better than Romney.)
In 2018, with Texas Republicans saddled with Trump’s border agenda, Democrats gained 12 seats in the Texas House, two in the state Senate, two in Congress and came closer to winning a statewide race than they had in 20 years.
Border communities tend to have complex relationships with Mexico, relationships that aren’t easily understood by people on the outside. There’s an economic codependency, a shared binational cultural identity, but also some ineffable resentments.
Trump successfully played to those resentments Monday. But, as he often does, he overplayed his hand. He echoed the lie he told during last week’s State of the Union address, when he said that El Paso was “considered one of the nation’s most dangerous cities” before the construction of 40 miles of fencing a decade ago.
As many news outlets have reported, El Paso was one of the nation’s safest cities well before the 2006 passage of the Secure Fence Act authorized the construction of El Paso’s border barrier.
Serious crime in El Paso dropped from 45,134 incidents in 1996 to 24,088 in 2004, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. While Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a loyal Trump ally, praised the border fence by boasting that El Paso recorded only 23 homicides last year, he didn’t mention that it had only 11 back in 2004 and only 13 in 2005.
Trump’s willingness to disparage El Paso for the sake of winning an argument prompted Dee Margo, the city’s Republican mayor, to say that the president “was given some misinformation.”
O’Rourke relished his role on Monday night as the optimistic anti-Trump, and in the process he recaptured some of the mojo that made him such a political phenomenon in his close but unsuccessful 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz.
O’Rourke clearly got into the president’s head, because Trump felt compelled to exaggerate his own crowd size and suggest that only 200-300 people showed up for an O’Rourke rally that in fact drew an estimated 7,000 people.
Texas is not only Trump’s political firewall. With its hundreds of miles of border territory, it’s the physical justification for everything that his presidency represents.
Both the firewall and the justification show signs of cracking.